Page:Physical Geography of the Sea and its Meteorology.djvu/345

Rh with them a grain of the finest sand, nor the smallest particle of gravel torn from the loose beds of debris that here and there strew the bottom of the sea. This plateau is not too deep for the wire to sink down and rest upon, yet it is not so shallow that currents, or icebergs, or any abrading force can derange the wire after it is once lodged there.

591. Is there life in them?—As Professor Bailey remarks (§ 587), the animalculæ, whose remains Brooke's lead has brought up from the bottom of the deep sea, probably did not live or die there. They would have had no light there, and, had they lived there, their frail little texture would have been subjected, in its growth, to the pressure of a column of water twelve thousand feet high, equal to the weight of four hundred atmospheres. They probably lived and died near the surface, where they could feel the genial influence of both light and heat, and were buried in the lichen caves below after death.

592. The ocean in a new light.—Brooke's lead and the microscope, therefore, it would seem, are about to teach us to regard the ocean in a new light. Its bosom, which so teems with animal life—its face, upon which time writes no wrinkles, makes no impression, are, it would now seem, as obedient to the great law of change as is any department whatever either of the animal or the vegetable kingdom. It is now suggested that henceforward we should view the surface of the sea as a nursery teeming with nascent organisms, its depths as the cemetery for families of living creatures that out-number the sands on the sea shore for multitude. Where there is a nursery, hard by there will be found also a graveyard; such is the condition of the animal world. But it never occurred to us before to consider the surface of the sea as one wide nursery, its every ripple a cradle, and its bottom one vast burial-place.

593. Levelling agencies.—On those parts of the solid portions of the earth's crust which are at the bottom of the atmosphere, various agents are at work, levelling both upwards and downwards. Heat and cold, rain and sunshine, the winds and the streams, all, assisted by the forces of gravitation, are unceasingly wasting away the high places on the land, and as perpetually filling up the low. But in contemplating the levelling agencies that are at work upon the solid portions of the crust of our planet which are at the bottom of the sea, one is led, at first thought, almost to the conclusion that these levelling agents are powerless